Friday, December 18, 2009

I started my holiday-inspired return to Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning by logging into my level 40/ RR 35 Ironbreaker on Badlands. The first order of business was restoring my UI. WAR's default UI serves its purpose, but there are a few things my minimalist gamer brain needs: clean unit frames, consolidated info bars, and easily customized hotbars.

Rebuilding a lost UI can be aggravating, but for WAR, there is a great tool available from Curse for management and automatic updates/installs of most UI elements. I highly recommend the Curse Client.

After thirty minutes of UI customization, I was ready to helicopter on out to the Tier 4 RvR lakes.

The first and immediate change noted upon logging into WAR is the new RvR summary page. Upon login, it details all of the current RvR hotspots and offers a quick teleport to the warcamp nearest the action. The teleport is only usable once every 8 hours, somewhat lowering the convenience of the tool, but keeping the game balance in check.

The action was in Eataine and once on the ground, I headed out. It wasn't long (about 30 seconds out of the warcamp) before I was eating dirt thanks to a full on zerg of Destruction players. My second run out was more fruitful as I skirted down the river and entered the RvR lake well outside the view of the enemy. However, this brought me back to a reason I quit WAR the first time around. The damn warcamps are too close together.

If a player is smart, like me, and runs around the immediate action, they are greeted with boredom as almost no one ventures out to the corners of the RvR lakes unless an objective is being contested and they have a zerg in tow. Its absolutely frustrating that Mythic has done nothing to encourage players to enter the tier 4 RvR lakes for anything more than mindless zerging back and forth between the warcamps.

This really soured my attitude and I ended up logging for the day. Day Two will see my first adventure into the Land of the Dead.

I started my holiday-inspired return to Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning by logging into my level 40/ RR 35 Ironbreaker on Badlands. The first order of business was restoring my UI. WAR's default UI serves its purpose, but there are a few things my minimalist gamer brain needs: clean unit frames, consolidated info bars, and easily customized hotbars.

Rebuilding a lost UI can be aggravating, but for WAR, there is a great tool available from Curse for management and automatic updates/installs of most UI elements. I highly recommend the Curse Client.

After thirty minutes of UI customization, I was ready to helicopter on out to the Tier 4 RvR lakes.

The first and immediate change noted upon logging into WAR is the new RvR summary page. Upon login, it details all of the current RvR hotspots and offers a quick teleport to the warcamp nearest the action. The teleport is only usable once every 8 hours, somewhat lowering the convenience of the tool, but keeping the game balance in check.

The action was in Eataine and once on the ground, I headed out. It wasn't long (about 30 seconds out of the warcamp) before I was eating dirt thanks to a full on zerg of Destruction players. My second run out was more fruitful as I skirted down the river and entered the RvR lake well outside the view of the enemy. However, this brought me back to a reason I quit WAR the first time around. The damn warcamps are too close together.

If a player is smart, like me, and runs around the immediate action, they are greeted with boredom as almost no one ventures out to the corners of the RvR lakes unless an objective is being contested and they have a zerg in tow. Its absolutely frustrating that Mythic has done nothing to encourage players to enter the tier 4 RvR lakes for anything more than mindless zerging back and forth between the warcamps.

This really soured my attitude and I ended up logging for the day. Day Two will see my first adventure into the Land of the Dead.